Winter Soldier by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 2008, Excerpts
I would like to share how one goes about becoming a concentration guard. I was seventeen years old when I joined the Army National Guard in
We got orders in October 2003 that we would be deploying to
The Freezer
I’ve heard a lot of speculation of what torture is. I would like to ask everyone to consider whether living in a cell for five years, away from your family and friends, without ever being given answers as to why you’re there, whether this is torture. Having to ask nineteen-year-old boys who don’t have any idea about the policies of their government why they are detained and the answers that we weren’t able to give – I consider that torture.
But if that wasn’t enough, we had other methods. I dispatched the detainee movements. I would come into the office at 4:30 in the morning and there would sometimes be a little paper in the wall with a number on it, which represented a detainee inside of an interrogation room. The temperature of the interrogation room was maybe 10 or 20 degrees, with loud music playing. Sometimes that detainee would stay there for my entire twelve- to fourteen-hour shift. He was shackled to the floor by his hands and his feet, with nothing to sit on, loud music playing, in the freezing cold. I guess that’s torture; that depends on who you ask.
Spray and Shave
I would also like to address the common usage of the Quick Reaction Force. If a detainee is unsatisfied with his stay and become rowdy, five men are fitted with riot gear and lined up outside of a cell while the platoon leader of that camp sprays the detainee in the face with pepper spray. I was sprayed with pepper spray once, and I feel that’s one of the worst moments in my life. It put me on my knees for two to three hours afterwards and in a great deal of pain for the next three days.
After spraying the detainee, these five men would rush in and take whatever opportunity they could. The Standard Operating Procedures do not state that you should beat the shit out of detainees, but I guess that some people just decided that’s what they were going to do anyway.
After the detainee is taken forcibly from his cell – that’s probably the first time that he’s left his cell in five, six, seven days – the detainees are beaten, pulled out to the back, shaved , all of their hair, their beard and then taken to wherever they were supposed to go.
These are all on tape, by the way. The government makes sure that each one of these operations is taped.
Detainee vs. Prisoner
There was on other thing I wanted address, about the use of the term “detainee.” We were told it had to be detainee. If it’s a prisoner, then they are a Prisoner of War, and subject to entirely different laws. If they’re detainees, they’re subject to no law whatsoever, because there aren’t any laws for detainees. Because they are called detainees, they don’t get trials and there is no code for how they’re treated. It’s semantics, and we need to pay close attention t those; they’re important. It’s the difference between calling something a detention facility and a concentration camp, even if they’re the same thing.
